“Who are you?” I yelled at a woodpecker pecking a bedroom nest in my one-bedroom apartment. “Are you Alder?” the woodpecker chatters back. “Yes. This is my Oakland apartment.” “Well I just hammered a hole in your landlord’s cerebellum. Now I’m on the lease. We’re roommates.” “W-what?” “Haven’t you noticed every Oakland tree is at […]
“How are you, Clementine?” “—.” “Why can’t you talk?” Clementine opens her mouth to reveal a frog in her throat. “Why is there a frog in your throat?” Clementine writes MY HUSBAND REDD PUT IT THERE on a torn page from her writing journal. “Can you remove the frog?” Clementine nods no. “Can you kill […]
Through her delivery room screams, Luna pushed out wailing life. While my genetic shadow had two human arms and two human legs, a lettuce head sat on top of her neck. I still drove home. In the passenger seat, Luna sobbed as she rocked Madeline’s lettuce head back and forth with a maternal palm. “You […]
Mary runs through the open gate of Mountain View Cemetery where gravestones surround her sweat on a curved road. In Mountain View, she gapes upon a downtown skyline. Stopping on a curved road, cemetery roses make her shiver. Sprinting on, she glares upon Downtown Oakland vaulting into a commercial sky […]
When Oakland took their bullet for a walk, that runaway caliber pressed its width into brown skin within a multigenerational neighborhood outsiders stamp as another ghetto. Oakland took their bullet for a jog to shake off the residue of last night’s murder. A brown skin boy I knew since he drank orphaned […]
In the night’s black crush, I carry wonder if we breathe alone within our exhale of stars. Under redshift hellos scattered across this big-hug sky, how many atmospheres out there welcome creatures who breathe and talk of love. Published in The Cosmos is Alive (Kelsay Books, 2023)
On cold sand, waves smash where we stand trapped within this San Francisco cityscape. Look up. I bet our galactic road curves to an Alpha Centauri wedding smacking upon lips of spectacle but we cannot pierce through streetlights cloaking the starlight above. We forgot how to shovel Milky Way glow into […]
Based on a true story A blackout opens city-wide eyes. In Echo Park, a man breathes panic, lost on his walk home as emergency dispatchers brew their teas under the artillery of voices phoning in about a strange glowing cloud: The Milky Way’s detonated stars drop onto Sunset Boulevard, disarming the Hollywood […]
When I plop the universe down like a freshwater catch onto my kitchen counter, I shimmy in an engine piston now driving an expanding cylinder: the host to glass galaxies, cast-iron planets, lead marrow babies born screaming in super-Earth saloons. Back in the cosmic frontier, our ancestors shot spaceward long before I busted and barreled […]
When butterfly stitches flap across my chest in our San Francisco bedroom, you touch fresh wings after a chrysalis of cancer got sliced out. In fourteen solar dips, when the butterfly falls from its ascent, another scar will join a map of melanoma scars. Under an imperial sun, will rays conquer my […]